The Real as a Narrative: Language, National Identity, and Bilingualism

This is my first reflection, somewhat cursory, on the fascinating politics of language, in particular in relation to the controversial and divisive issue of bilingualism/multilingualism within the history of different national-states that are of my personal interest and curiosity such as Spain, Belgium, France, and South Africa and others such as Canada and the United States. After centuries of warfare, civil wars, religious and racial tensions, the Nation-State has been able to negotiate these differences, guaranteeing the relative functioning of the central or federal State as the focus of power. However, today it seems as if Language, even beyond religion, appears as the main cultural factor complicating the definition of the Nation-State and National identity. The different conflicts between linguistic communities sharing the same state has encouraged me to seek a definition of language as a stage built as the means for the understanding and construction of the Real. I see Language as the system through which we enter and experience history; the beginning of history. We are what we speak, since the languages that we speak introduce us as active participants into cultural and political universes, constructed with language, that transcends geographical borders, even more so today, with the advent of new technologies in communication which allows individuals to remain constantly connected to their native communities despite the distance and time. This, in addition to the legacy of colonialism, which expanded the geographical reach of many languages, has created the possibility for the existence of transnational cultural 'states' united by a common language.

Language

Perhaps no other cultural expression unites people like a common language. Through language we fix the world around us, we define it, stabilize it; we end it by setting its boundaries. The world, its social and natural phenomena become arbitrarily attached to symbols and sounds. In essence, language is the collective task of naming or, in more cynical terms, the act of labeling the the world, but as we often experience, the labels are not as effective in defining the reality they represent. It is not only ironic, but unsettling to realize that what connects us as a community is an incomplete system of symbols characterized by an arbitrary nature. For instance, in politics language often fails to describe new or unprecedented events, forcing the centers of official discourse, such as the Press, the State and its educational system, to exploit and stigmatize words or labels such as liberal, socialist or even progressive, effectively substituting the Real, which they cannot explain, or even understand, with language itself. The referent becomes more real than the referred.
Not only words seem to be separated from the reality they represent, but they obtain, mystically or even irrationally, a life of their own. The Real is what is Narrated and mass replicated. However, language often explains nothing, it becomes a mere smoke screen between us and Reality. It is in language where we reconstruct or re-stage Reality but in world submerged in ideology, as the different pillars and institutions of power battle to possess the right to reconstruct the Real, that is, Reality as we understand it, the interpretation of facts, which is the power to establish the official truth.
Words are illusions which attempt to fix a reality that is often fluid and unstable like the sand of the desert. Reality is as complex and rebellious as our human emotions, never ceasing to defy expectations and preconceptions, leaving us with words as an inane system of empty symbols. In concrete terms, the failure of language is visible all around us. The more I study history, the contradictions keep appearing. The real practical world reduces language to an ideological imposition over Reality. For example, during the Algerian War (1954-1962) it was a Socialist prime minister, Guy Mollet, who escalated the military presence of the French army in Algeria to 500,000 men. On the other hand, it was the Right wing, World War II hero, Charles de Gaulle, who brought an end to the war by betraying his 'ultra' conservative supporters, who had staged a Coup d'Etat that brought him back from retirement to head the French government in the spring of 1958. In our world dominated by ideological perception, the task of the Right is often best exercised by the Left and vice versa, which is often the result of the public's proclivity to place attention on who is performing the action and not on what the acts are in themselves. This is the nature of ideology. The examples are innumerable, it is enough to briefly revise history of certain events such as the American War in Vietnam (1959-1973) to perceive the ideological contradictions and the failure and exploitation of language.

Nation-States

Now, this detour brings me to my fascination with National-identity and language. The Nation-state, that beloved institution with its pride, symbols, and history or common narrative is far from being a stable and uniform entity. All nation-states are the product of colonialism and imperialism, continental or transcontinental. It is surprising how the nation is politically exploited as a source of identity, assumed to be uniformed, centered around a common history and culture, when in fact the nature of nations is based on an artificial uniformity, masking the origin in the plurality of cultures and peoples. Nations are pointillistic images that only appear uniformed from afar. Rarely a Nation-state is a homogeneous territoriality belonging to one people, providing them with a secure, uniform and separate identity. Nation-states are the product of conquest, expansion, and annexation by a central group which, in order to sustain the authority to rule, attempts to incorporate other groups into a single political and cultural unit. However, in other less benevolent cases, the center of power has tried to purge elements that it considers not only foreign but incompatible or non assimilable as part of the identity of the national group.
The different nation-making projects around meticulously historically specific and unique to each national context with its distinctive levels of success in unity and integration of the different pluralities, often located in the periphery. Undeniably, the origin of most modern nation-states is the product of colonialism and imperialism. The history of many modern nations reveal a process of centralization by a dominant ethnic group or nation over adjacent or even distant territories and peoples. In the case of modern transplanted societies, the nation-state was the result of a foreign group displacing a native population and establishing itself as the dominant center of power, both politically and culturally, if not economically, which the migrants, minorities, and other indigenous groups must use as a referent for assimilation. For instance, even though the United States ethnic diversity has been the norm as a nation of immigrants, recent newcomers are expected to integrate to the Anglo-Saxon cultural dominant group. The same applies to nations such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada as Anglo-Saxons nations with historic levels of immigration, founded on the displacement of indigenous populations. However, it is not discussing the past as such that interests me, instead I'm personally intrigued by how present is haunted by the past, that is, the traumatic legacy of the colonial past, which has produced a myriad of national projects with different levels of cultural division and fragmentation between descendants of the colonizers and the colonized, and the different colonial groups that were part of the national formation (e.g. South Africa as a territory colonized by two European imperial powers, the Netherlands and England).
Canada
In North America, Canada, despite its cultural and historical links to the United States as territories colonized by England, has a more complex and less aggressive construction of national identity. As a territory colonized by two different European powers, Canada has been a nation-state tormented, especially in recent decades, by the specter of secession by its largest and second most populated province, Quebec. Here is where language and bilingualism appears as the catalyst for division. While French is the unique official language of Quebec, at the national level Canada is a bilingual nation. Whereas in Quebec language policy aims at promoting the dominance of French against the cultural imperialism of the English language arriving from the rest of Canada and the US. The opponents of bilingualism see the expansion of French beyond Quebec as threat to the cultural tradition of Canada as an Anglo-Saxon nation founded by British colonists and loyalists.
Belgium
This leads me to Europe and some of its different Nation-states projects, from the decentralized federal Belgium and Spain to the centralist state of France. the Kingdom of Belgium in particular is a state that is profoundly unique and thus appealing as an object of study. Belgium is a composed nation, formed in the cultural boundary between Germanic and Latin Europe, made up of two distinctive regions, French-speaking Wallonia and Flemish-speaking Flanders. It is a nation of two peoples under one state, created after the it achieved independence from the Netherlands in 1830. As a way to prevent France from annexing Belgium, the other European major powers established a German monarch as king of Belgium, Leopold I. Belgium today is a nation not only geographical but politically divided by languages. Initially, Belgium had begun as a bilingual state in which French was the privileged language. The dominance of French continue throughout the 19th century changing the linguistic landscape of the nation as francophone migrants moved from Wallonia to Dutch speaking Brussels. By the early 20th century Brussels had been transformed into a French speaking city, due in part to the adoption of French by many Flemish citizens living in Brussels. Belgium started as a centralist state with the French aristocracy at the center of power, however, gradually the State evolved into a federation as the cultural divisions demanded the creation of fixed cultural and linguistic boundaries after 1963 between the Francophone south and the Flemish north. The capital, Brussels, which is located within Flanders, a few miles from Wallonia, was redefined as the only official bilingual region, surrounded by the Dutch language, as a political maneuver designed to satisfy Flemish nationalism seeking to limit the expansion of the French language in Flanders. The historical development of Brussels presents a fascinating image of a city surrounded by a cultural fence that evolved from being a Dutch speaking regional town into the capital of Europe where French is the main language along side Dutch and English.
Spain
Another complex nation-state formation is the Kingdom of Spain. The nation-making project in Spain reveals the truth of most nation-states as political entities created from fragments by expansion and conquest. The current rise of right wing nationalism in Europe and North America, revived by the opposition against immigrations, often pretends to erase history by denying the origin of these nations in the assimilation of a plurality of peoples. Spain due to its geographical location has witness an evolution from a territory of invasions and conquest by distant groups to a kingdom driven by internal conquest, impulse which later provided the impetus to continue its conquest beyond the Iberian peninsula, transforming itself into a transoceanic empire. Spain was a nation unified under a assiduous military campaign for 7 centuries against the elements that considered foreign territory, namely, its Muslim conquerors and Jewish inhabitants. By the 15th century the reconquest of the peninsula was completed with the fall of Granada, the last Muslim kingdom is Spain. However, the constant fighting performed during the Reconquista and the exhaustive construction of the Spanish empire diverted economic and military resources from the nation-state project, leaving Spain as a nation composed by culturally diverse kingdoms united by the centrifugal force of a center of power. Modern Spain, unlike France, is one of the most decentralized States in the West. It is a nation-state made of 19 autonomous regions, many of which, such as the Basque Country, Catalonia, Galicia have their own official language. It is in this regions where bilingualism is an issue of conflict and division as regional nationalism is seeking to reverse history and create their own independent nation-states by fostering an separate identity based almost exclusively on language. It is important to note how high levels of economic development, beyond any other motive, is what sustains and inspires independence movements.
France
France, unlike Spain, is a more successful nation-state project as the result of a centralist campaign launched after the French Revolution...

I'm leaving...

I think that I've finally discovered what I want. I know that I can't come to terms with this place and this society of excess. I no longer care about material things, I have no personal ambitions, or I just gave them up after failing to materialize the most elemental dreams anyone can have. The idea of following a conventional life and finding myself stuck in the endless cycle of routine work and consumerism simply scares the hell of me. Now I want to place myself in a context in which life can have a meaning beyond my own needs and desires. If I don't deserve to receive, then I would like to try to give. I want to leave this place, I want to be in a forsaken continent where I can feel needed, where I can share the knowledge and love of history with children, or teach them how to write and read in English, or even in French. It doesn't scare me to abandon the affluence of this society, on the contrary, I fear staying and finding myself lost, without a path in a world of dead passions. I no longer know if I care about going to graduate school, I just want to leave and forget all about this place.

Women and Godard

At first sight Godard’s representation of women seems to be more complex than the traditional image offered by Classical Hollywood; however, his films cannot avoid reflecting the typical male ambivalence towards women, which sees them both as objects of love and contempt—goddesses or cruel vamps. This view of women can be best understood within the context of his society where religious conservatism was clashing with changes in sexual and gender norms and expectations. Ironically, at the same time that his films explore characters who are unrestrained by traditional bourgeois norms, Godard appeared to have been terrified at the idea of having a child out of wedlock that he rushed to marry Anna Karina when she was pregnant.
Although Godard’s films, Breathless and Une Femme est une Femme, expose feminine issues such as pregnancy, sexuality, and women’s labor, they fail to present a different view of women from the ones previously seen in Art, in particular the French Avant-Garde, in which women are muses and incomprehensible enigmas that can be lethal at times. This view of the lethal woman is a continuation of the Film Noir’s femme fatale. Breathless is a great example of this male ambivalence. Patricia, the love interest of Michel Poiccard, is the one who leads him to his death by informing the police of his location. Une Femme est une Femme.

Meeting the Other

When cultures with completely different value systems crash, conflict often arises from a deep lack of understanding, rooted sometimes in a willingness to see and judge the other only under our own discourse and language. The filmmaker Werner Herzog has brought to the screen in several of his films these conflicts of understanding and communication between different cultures. His 1983 film Wo die Grünen Amaisen Träumen (Where the Green Ants Dream), Herzog shows the conflict between the Australian aborigines and a mining corporation looking for uranium in their lands where the aborigines have lived for 40,000 years. The aborigines object to the mining operations and try to stop the digging to protect the land where the green ants dream. In Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Herzog also brings to the screen the meeting of two very different worlds; the Spanish conquistadors and the Natives of the Amazon. In their quest of El Dorado, the knowledge, value system and weaponry of the Spaniards seems out of place in the jungle.
The inability of one culture to understand another is mainly grounded in language. As humans we are constraint by language, the medium through which we construct, define, and explain reality. How can we know the other, when the same words can mean different things for different cultures? As Ludwig Wittgenstein explains on “The Nature of Philosophy”, “the goal of philosophy is to build a wall where language comes to an end.” Thus, philosophy must be defined as a mechanism needed to liberate people’s views and comprehension from the limits and traps of language, in other words, the limits created by looking at the world from a fixed point of view, ideology or discourse. As Wittgenstein says “[Humans] cannot be freed without first being extricated from the extraordinary variety of associations which hold them prisoner.”
No other situation illustrates the limits of language than the meeting of two different cultures. Where the Green Ants Dream, the value system and rituals of the Australian aborigines seem just simply bizarre to the white Australian engineers. For the aborigines, land is not understood in terms of property, or as something to exploit and profit from. Their language cannot define land in such terms, simply because for them such terms are unknown, foreign to their culture. The films opens with an aerial shot of the mining fields where the drilling had left small white sand pyramids, resembling ant hills, which had been blown apart by a tornado. Then we see the heavy machinery working its way through the land. The tornado becomes a metaphor for the West and its technological potential that can destroys the land and everything on its way like a tornado. A geologist, Lance Hackett is in charge of supervising the drilling and excavations, but he is confronted by the aborigines who refuse to leave the sacred land of their ancestors where the green ants dream. The destruction of the ants, they fear, will cause a natural catastrophe or a cosmic disaster.
The mining company tries to bribe the aborigines with money and 10% of the profits if the mine is productive, but the aborigines cannot accept this; for them the land of the ants is sacred, thus it cannot be sold or destroyed. For the aborigines the Land Act of the Commonwealth has no significance, they land had been theirs for 40,000 years, why should they accept laws that were not part of their history and ancestry? As one of the elders tells Hackett: “You don’t understand. How would you like it if someone drove a bulldozer over your church?” Hackett, unlike his executive bosses and the workers, is desperately trying to understand the aborigines by talking to an ethnologist, who has rejected civilization for the desert; and a scientist who is fascinated by the ants. Finally, after so much resistance from the aborigines, the mining corporation takes conflict to justice. The aborigines are taken to court, where they are judged under British Common Law, which is a system of law unknown to them, their culture, and understanding of the world. The judge unfairly rules against the aborigines, who must leave their lands to mining company. The scene in the court room is almost ludicrous, the aborigines are brought into a world to which they do not belong, and are judged under a value system that is unable to understand who they are.
In Aguirre, The Wrath of God, Herzog shows how the value system and technical knowledge of one culture becomes inefficient in a different environment that is more appropriate for native cultures. Aguirre, the Wrath of God is the story of a Spanish expedition in the Amazon River in the 16th century. The events are narrated by the priest, Carvajal, who is recording in his diary their odyssey in the jungle. Although Carvajal is narrating and describing what happens, the point of view of the camera is completely independent of him. The film opens with an aerial shot of the expedition descending from the Andes, covered by clouds as if they were descending from heaven. The technology of the Spaniards, their armor, weapons, horses seem useless in this terrain. As the soldiers navigate on a raft, the natives shoot arrows at them; they shoot their cannon into the jungle without any success, trying to kill an invisible enemy. In the film the natives are almost absent, except when a groups of natives, who refused conversion to Christianity, are killed. The Spanish soldiers are all killed one by one or die from hunger. As they agonize, they hallucinate, which is very ironic because all throughout the expedition their perception of reality had been altered by greed for gold. The culture, religion, and weapons of the Spanish ultimately fail to save them from their death in the Amazon jungle. Even thought they considered their culture to be superior to that of the natives, under a different environment their knowledge and technology seem utterly powerless.
The understanding of the other is complicated by limitation in our language, through which we communicate and make sense of what we see and experience. For the aborigines of Where the Green Ants Dream, the language of the capitalist West is totally incomprehensible, while the West cannot understand the beliefs of the aborigines, which they reject as superstition. For a complete agreement to take place, both sides would have to liberate themselves from the constraints of their language, only there can a solution be found. On the other hand, no understanding can exist between cultures if one tries to impose its values on the other and vise versa. The Spanish soldiers in Aguirre, the Wrath of God ultimately fail to know the other, whom is considered to lack a real culture of their own, thus, in need of conversion by the colonial master.

Reality

I have come to realize that what we consider important in our lives is totally arbitrary and fabricated. For instance, in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up the mimes are playing tennis with an imaginary ball as if saying that as long as we all believe in something collectively, it becomes real, even if it is not. This would explain how a lie can become true to a culture as long as we all accepted as valid. Meaning is created socially. As an individual you may believe whatever you want, but without the validation of the others your beliefs lose significance and reality.

Meaning

This is very interesting, it's fascinating how all these things seem to support the way I feel about the world. So far I've only scratched the surface, but I'm extremely fascinated. I've been trying to answer what creates meaning to our existence. I've been working on this idea that we are actors on a stage, called life, and that all that we are and do seem to be in relation to an audience.

The power structures that exist in our society makes me question to what extent are we really free. For Foucault even the unorthodox young university professor is a fabrication of the institution he belongs to. It's a way for the system to makes us believe that universities are not coercive institutions, so this popular academics are illusions that makes us belief that we are free.